


welcome to physics

by pacificnewt



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Married idiots, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim (2013), blind newton geiszler, deaf hermann gottlieb, hermann and newt are teachers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-30 18:14:07
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,406
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17833631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pacificnewt/pseuds/pacificnewt
Summary: Newt prefers an exciting approach to teaching.





	welcome to physics

**Author's Note:**

> god help these absolute fucking idiots

Newton Geiszler was not one to watch paint dry or grass grow, but he sure as  _ hell _ would watch a clock like a hawk.

 

He was easily impatient when it came to his job. It should have been easy enough-- sit in the back of a classroom and listen to his husband prattle on about numbers for a good hour, interject things in places he could just to get a rise, and then nearly jump from his seat when it was time for them to switch. Newt knew he should grade papers in the back while he waited his “turn”, so to speak, but all he could do was bounce his legs, yell things out like a student, and admire (criticize) the way Hermann taught their students.

 

The room was smaller than a lecture hall. Their joint physics and biology class was small, so it didn’t require a huge room to seat people. It closely resembled a high school science lab and accommodated their class of fifteen-ish students. There was a desk up front and lab tables in the back, one of which Newt was seated at, laptop open and papers askew.

 

“...Which is why Einstein’s theory of relativity is so crucial, because--”

 

“Time’s up!” The clock struck two, and Newt jumped up right on the dot.

 

Hermann squinted and made a vague gesture at his ear. “One more time?”

 

Newt cupped his hands around his mouth and yelled, “My time to shine!” He slammed the top of his computer down and practically skipped up to the desk. “Didja hear me that time?”

 

“Quite,” Hermann mumbled, grimacing. He checked the time himself as though he didn’t believe Newt, and then he nodded to nobody and began to clear the board behind him. “I will continue on tomorrow. Please pay attention to Professor Geiszler-Gottlieb, as hard as that may be.” Newt chuckled and kissed Hermann’s cheek, much to a select few students’ dismay.

 

“Call me  _ Newt _ ,” he corrected out loud, then threw himself down into the spinning chair and cast his papers across the desk. Hermann lingered by the desk until Newt began to shoo him off towards the back. “Go on! Go sit pretty, you already bored them enough!”

 

Hermann rolled his eyes and brought himself back to Newt’s former seat. Newt watched as he turned the volume down on his hearing aids so he could focus on doing what his husband and co-teacher had failed to do-- grade papers like a responsible professor.

 

Once Hermann was taken care of, Newt clapped together his hands and kicked his feet up on the desk. “What are we learnin’ today, kids?”

 

A girl in the front with a 4.0 raised her hand. “Isn’t that according to you, Professor?”

 

“Normally, yeah, but I’m a little worn out. I had an eventful night,” Newt said sideways to the class with a finger pointed back at Hermann.

 

Several students in the room whooped and hollered, a few recoiled in disgust, and a few sat in confusion as the implication went directly over their heads. Newt burst out laughing and his feet fell from the desk while he buried his face in his arms. “I am  _ kidding _ , you animals! Fine, fine, I’ll do my job, I  _ suppose _ . I know this is biology or whatever, but what d’ya say we do a little experiment in here?”

 

A boy toward the back groaned. “I came here to learn biology, not chemistry.”

 

Newt nodded, licked his lips, and sat himself up on the desk. Hermann worked dutifully in the back as though he couldn’t hear a thing. Except he really couldn’t. “Yeah, okay, do you wanna write that down for me?” The boy stared back at him with a confused expression, and Newt repeated himself. The boy gave Newt a sideways glance and begrudgingly wrote down what he had been instructed to. Newt jumped up and collected the paper, crumpled it into a ball, and made an obnoxious show of hurling it across the room into the garbage can. “Boom. Complaint filed. If you don’t want to participate, don’t let the door hit ya where the good lord split ya. Otherwise, let’s do  _ fun _ science!”

 

Three students gathered their things and left after deciding they weren’t in the mood to do some fooling around. Newt looked back excitedly at the twelve people left and sat back on his desk. “Mmkay. We’re gonna have to be careful about this, are you all listening? We can’t do it in the lab or else Hermann’ll yell at me, and trust me, none of you want to be here when that happens. Instead we’re just gonna do this around this here desk and pray to whatever God is up there that he doesn’t look up.” The students all laughed, enjoying the fact that they were in on this shenanigan. 

 

Newt clapped his hands together again. “This is gonna be  _ fun _ . Anyone in here ever seen potassium react with water?” Crickets. Newt’s lips turned up in a wicked grin. “Great.” He watched Hermann carefully to make sure he didn’t catch him in the act. He opened a set of cabinets near the desk to fish out a large glass beaker and then set it on the nearest desk. “Fill this to the top line, however many grams or whatever that is,” he said to the girl in the desk. 

 

Once she filled it at the sink and brought it back to the desk in front, Newt went back into a cabinet on the other side of the room for a potassium sample. He was gentle with it even though he handled it without gloves. “I’m gonna need everybody to stand up and move to the side of the room,” Newt announced, and the students obeyed. They left their things at their sides and moved over to where Newt stood. Newt looked back to Hermann, who was shaking his head in disappointment at a paper he was giving a once-over. “Maybe cover your ears, too.” Approaching the beaker of water carefully, he stopped in front of it and squeezed the potassium in his hand. “Bottoms up!” And Newt dropped the metal into the beaker.

 

He dove away from it quickly to the floor, knocking his own glasses off in the process. After about two seconds, the reaction made a noise like a small bomb and exploded into the room. The beaker shattered into several pieces and flew like shrapnel a good distance toward the back of the room. The noise was loud enough to startle Hermann even with the volume of his hearing aids turned down low. 

 

As soon as Newt’s glasses fell off his field of vision was blurred significantly. He cursed himself for not being able to see without them, fumbling around on the ground to find where they’d bounced over to. Hermann rose from his seat. Newt couldn’t see it, but he was fuming.

 

“Newton  _ Geiszler _ ,” he started, always in the tone that sounded softly disappointed yet also so angry. It was how Newt knew he was about to get his ass handed to him even without being able to see him.

 

“Herms! You wanna give me my glasses?” Newt looked up at what he could guess to be Hermann’s figure that limped over to him, an innocent grin plastered on his face.

 

“Allow me to get this straight. You are a biology teacher, correct? You specialize in anatomy, specifically that of Kaiju.”

 

Newt pursed his lips. Here it came. “That would be correct.”   
  
“And nowhere in teaching biology is  _ playing with chemicals _ a skill to have.”

 

“That is also correct.”

 

Hermann used his cane to point toward the pieces of broken glass and water all over the floor. “So then not only have you broken clear rules, you endangered everybody in this room!”

 

Newt looked as though he was holding back a laugh. He was. “It was pretty fucking cool, though.”

 

The bell rang, as if on cue, and Hermann stepped aside so the laughing students could collect their things to leave. After the last of them had dashed out the door, Hermann began to follow.

 

“Hey, hey, wait, can I have my glasses back?” Newt sensed around him that people were leaving. Hermann stopped in the doorway and slid the spectacles across the floor near his hand with the bottom of his cane.

 

“Clean it up, Newton,” Hermann said, then closed the door behind him.


End file.
